Vintage Campello at auction

Since several of you (mostly fellow Americans who were lucky enough to have spent part of our life in Scotland) have asked me about these Scottish watercolors... 

This one is on Ebay right now at a great price... 

These vintage pieces have been appraised for as much as $5000 (much larger pieces)... someone in Las Vegas is offering this one starting for under $200!

Best of Bethesda Magazine (redux)

I'm in broken record mode...

About two years ago, after going through the January 2014 issue (Best of Bethesda issue) of Bethesda Magazine, I started this trail:

1. Read this first.

2.Then I wrote this open letter to the magazine.

3. And then Bethesda Magazine's editor responded to my letter; read the response here.

To summarize, for decades now, I've been complaining about this beautiful magazine's lack of interest and coverage in their focus area's visual arts. 

If the magazine gave the visual arts 5% of the attention that it gives to restaurants, theatres, books, and even cinema, perhaps the area's always struggling, but once promising visual art scene, wouldn't have collapsed as it did a few years ago with the closure of nearly all of Bethesda's independently owned fine art galleries. 

I know, I know... probably from their internal research, the mag's staff believes that their readers probably could care less about their visual art scene... the magazine is giving its readers (and advertisers) what they want to read, blah, blah, blah.

The January 2016 Best of Bethesda issue magazine itself is beautiful, always offering a deep insight into the social, culinary, educational, political (there's a major piece in the current issue pretty much painting (no pun intended) a glowing portrait of Congressman Van Hollen, who is currently campaigning for a move up the Congressional food chain, and is running for Senator), etc. take of Bethesda, Maryland. From the article I learned that he's apparently never held a private industry job (other than part time summer jobs in college) in his life and has apparently always worked for politicians in government until he also became a career politician.

There are two tiny, peripheral mentions of the visual arts in this issue (none of them as part of the Best of), but they are glancing at best - but better than nothing, as it has been in the past. 

That's an improvement over last year!

In his response to my open letter about the magazine's track record of largely ignoring the area's visual arts, the magazine's editor wrote that we would be "seeing more coverage of the arts in Bethesda Magazine..." and that he also agreed with me "about the Best of Bethesda, and we will have at least one arts category in next year's issue."

Cough, cough... There has been some slight improvement, but I think that the magazine has a long way to go.

At the risk of repeating myself:

Here's a small slice of what the magazines' editors generally ignore, and because of their apathy towards the visual arts, what the magazine's readers are essentially missing:

- The Bethesda Fine Arts Festival is one of the highest ranked outdoor arts festivals in the nation and it is the highest ranked outdoor fine art show in all of Maryland. There are other significant outdoor art festivals in Bethesda Row and in Rockville. There was this coverage in 2015... as a listed event, not as a focus piece.

- The Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards (also known as The Trawick Prize in honor of Ms. Carol Trawick, a Bethesda supporter of the arts who sponsors the prize) is a visual art prize produced by the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District that honors artists from Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. The annual juried competition awards $14,000 in prize monies to selected artists and features the work of the finalists in a group exhibition. It has been going on for over a decade and it produces an exhibition that is usually one of the highlights of the Greater DC area visual art calendar. The prize winners didn't even get a mention in 2015.

- The Bethesda Painting Awards is downtown Bethesda's annual juried art competition that exclusively honors painters from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. $14,000 in prize monies are awarded to the top four painters annually. It also produces an exhibition that is again one of the highlights of the Greater DC area visual art calendar. The prize winners didn't even get a mention in 2015.

I wish that the magazine could go back in time and cover the once struggling Bethesda art gallery scene, but in the last few years most Bethesda art galleries have closed their doors due to lack of sales or local interest. Closed are the physical spaces for Fraser Gallery, once the DC area's largest commercial art gallery. Gone are Orchard Gallery, Neptune Gallery, Discovery Gallery, Zenith Gallery, Heineman-Myers Contemporary, and several other galleries. Nonetheless, Waverly Gallery, Strathmore, VisArts, Gallery B, and others continue to offer monthly visual art shows that are routinely ignored by the magazine... other than for their calendar.

I understand that running a glossy magazine like this one depends on a tenuous relationship between its advertisers' ability to pay for full page ads, and thus try to reach the area's readers with disposable income. 

And I also know that art galleries generally do not have the financial ability to advertise in a glossy such as this beautiful magazine is, and thus a chicken and the egg syndrome exists from that angle.  

Unless the magazine has an "insider" who can see this, and thus champion the fact that exposing the visual arts to its readers should be an expected condiment to the magazine's final soup recipe, the problem/issue will never be solved, and as far as readers (and would be advertisers) can infer, the visual arts does not exist in the area.

Also repeating myself: What can Bethesda Magazine do to help to kindle awareness (and thus develop support) for the Bethesda visual art scene and Bethesda artists?

- Two or three visual art stories and/or reviews a year... stories or reviews, not social scene pieces.

- Two or three small highlights a year on Bethesda artists (like you do routinely for authors, and doctors, and chefs, etc.) - like this one, but with an art (rather than just social) approach.

- In each issue, highlight one piece of art that is being displayed somewhere in Bethesda; like the outdoor mural mentioned in the current issue, but do not just focus on public art: spread the wealth and highlight a piece hanging in one of the area's few remaining art spaces. It is curious that this particular mural received not one, not two, but three mentions in the magazine throughout the past year! In fact, from looking at this search, one easy way for an artist to get into the magazine is by creating a mural!

- And for the love of art, please create art a category dealing with the visual arts in your Best of Bethesda issues!

Happy 2016!

Here's a wish for a Happy New Year's wish to all planetary life, but especially to all my fellow veterans and all Americans on active duty; and to all of the men and women in our Armed Forces all over the planet, and who are away from their families and their nation on New Year's Day, with a special cyber hug to all my U.S. Navy brothers and sisters at sea - we've got your back!

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline for submissions is Tuesday, February 16, 2016.

This March CHAL hosts its annual DC-metro area Open Call juried art exhibit based on the theme Appetite for Art. They are challenging all metro artists to interpret your art and food. 2-D and 3-D work will be accepted.

This year's jurors are Deidre Ehlen MC Williams, Public Art Project Manager and Stephen Cheung, owner of Fusion Grill and Lavagna.  They will select 30 pieces of artwork and select five for cash prizes. All artists, 18 years of age or older residing in the Washington, DC metropolitan area are eligible to enter.

Deadline for submissions is Tuesday, February 16, 2016.

All awards will be presented at the opening reception and jurors’ talk on Saturday, March 5, 2016, 5–7 PM, with the jurors presenting their remarks at 6 PM.  

Please click HERE to see the full prospectus for this Open Call. 

The exhibit runs March 5 through April 15.

Wake effect from SOFA Chicago

Pop Quiz!!!

What's the wake effect?

Answer here.

And the wake effect from SOFA Chicago, almost two months ago, is that (after being seen in that fair) this 2013 drawing has found a home and is now heading to a collector in Cincinnati, Ohio!

Supergirl Flying Naked
2013 F. Lennox Campello
Charcoal on Paper, 14 x 8.25 inches

Art Exhibits at Brookside Gardens: Linda DeCamp

As we've done over the years, visited Brookside Gardens on Monday night to see their amazing Garden of Lights display - and even though it was rainy and drizzly and cold, the place was packed! If you haven't been, it is one of the great outdoor marvels of the DMV and it only happens once a year!

While at the visitor center, I checked out the artwork on exhibit there... Brookside Gardens supports and promotes all the arts with show opportunities and by working with individual artists, groups of artists, and public sector agencies including the Montgomery County Arts Council and the Public Arts Trust.


Brookside Gardens Art Exhibit Calendar is fully booked through 2017. Applications for 2018 will be accepted beginning Jan. 1, 2016 Questions? Contact ArtatBrookside@aol.com

Art Exhibit Application and Exhibition Guidelines


Anyway, while checking out the work, several paintings by artist Linda DeCamp stood out to me because of their freshness and painterly handling of the texture of the oil paints. If anyone knows the artist, please have her drop me a line, as I may have a client for one of her works (I know someone who collects beach paintings).

Curator's Office reopens in new space

Andrea Pollan's Curator's Office is back!

Curator's Office is excited to announce the gallery venue, Curator's Office @ Edgewood Studios, at 703 Edgewood Street NE, Washington, DC. To launch this venue officially, Curator's Office is presenting an exhibition of noted artist Jeff Spaulding's sculptural work entitled Vintage. This warehouse building has a rich artist studio history in the city and has been the working space of some of the finest artists in the greater Washington, DC area including Siemon Allen, Kristina Bilonick, Kendall Buster, Patrick Craig, Tara Donovan, Ian Jehle, Patrice Kehoe, Patrick McDonough, Ledelle Moe, Jefferson Pinder, W.C. Richardson, and Yuriko Yamaguchi among numerous others. Jeff Spaulding, one of the original artists in this building, has had his studio here for almost 30 years.

Jeff Spaulding
Partial Installation View: Walker, Gate, & Riker
asphalt on wood, charcoal, variable dimensions.

The gallery space is in the studio building located above Mess Hall. A gray metal door with signage is the entrance to the studio building as you drive down Edgewood Street. It is located on your right. There is street parking on weekends. The closest Metro station is Rhode Island Ave - Brentwood Station on the Red Line. This artist studio building can be cold in January. Please dress warmly. 

On the same paper pad!

Don't you find it interesting how all these artists all worked these drawings on the same type of paper? Cough, cough... The "finds" one "finds" on Ebay!

See them all here.

Kahlo...

Dali...

Pollock...

Botero...

New Alma Selimovic

DeviD is Alma Selimovic's latest piece and it is inspired by Michelangelo's David as you might notice.

Alma has a plan to make a series of androgynous sculptures that are inspired by famous paintings and or sculptures. 

DeviD is 27" tall and will stand on a thick slab of glass. It will be in New York next year at one of the fairs during Armory week... unless one of you wants to add it to your collection now!

DeviD by Alma Selimovic

DeviD by Alma Selimovic

Xmas loot

Wait till you guys see some of the crazy socks that I got for 2015 Xmas...

A Christmas Eve story

Those of you who know me... know that I am not a what would be described as an overly religious person; that's not a disclaimer, but a fact.

I went to a Catholic elementary school (Our Lady of Loretto in Brooklyn), but my family was also not religious at all.

For 2015, we wanted to get Anderson an outdoor basketball hoop. As there are dozens of them around our neighborhood, we asked our neighbors if anyone wanted to pass one on, and one of our generous neighbors did.

"We actually inherited the hoop from another neighbor," they said, "And our kids have moved on."

As the hoop was going to be a Christmas present from Santa, and in order to sneak it into our yard at the last possible minute, last night, around 8PM, I trekked to their house, about a quarter of a mile away, preparing to drag the hoop over to our house.

I vastly under estimated the weight of the hoop (pole, base and backboard), which has small wheels at the front of its base to allow for relocation movement, but clearly not designed to be dragged by one man for that long of a distance.

About five minutes into the ordeal, and already soaked in sweat and breathing heavily, as I passed one of the light poles on the street heading to our street, I was startled by my own shadow.

My shadow, stooped over and carrying the heavy basketball hoop, with the backboard on my shoulders and the pole dragging behind me, startled me because it looked exactly like a man carrying a cross.

"I wonder what any neighbor who sees this from their house would think," I thought. In the dark of the night, with just some peripheral light from the light poles, it would be easy to confuse me with some zealous penitent carrying a cross.

I struggled on, my shoulders really aching now, and my sweat pouring from my brow, and my baseball cap being crushed into my eyes by the backboard, so that I had to stop and take my glasses off, and re-adjust the red Nats cap..

As I stopped and lost the momentum, and I was on a slight uphill, it became really hard to get the hoop going again.

"What I need now is a Simon to help me," I thought. The "Simon" being Simon of Cyrene, of course... the man who according to the Bible helped The Christ to carry the cross.

Almost immediately a tall, gangly, dark-haired young man stepped out of the shadows, his hair full of tight black curls.

"Sir," he said, "Can I help you carry that?"

"Thank you!" I almost shouted as he put his shoulder to the backboard and together we trudged along; the task a lot easier now.

"I really appreciate it," I told him as we carried the hoop side by side. "This is for my son," I explained. "Do you live around here?"

He told me that he was a visitor, and was visiting his girlfriend, who lived in our neighborhood.

We carried the hoop to our cul-de-sac, placed it in the right spot, and shook hands.

"Thank you a million times," I said to him. "My name is Lenny, Merry Christmas."

"My name is Simon," he responded as he walked away into the shadows..."Merry Christmas."

I walked back into my house, soaked in sweat and breathing heavily, and then, and only then, it dawned on me.